by K. W. Jeter
"I'll have to take you out of here—"
"No." Dax shook her head, sending her visual field even farther askew. "We came in here for a reason—there's things we need to find out. I think there's a way I can take care of this."
"How?"
"Under normal conditions, a Trill cannot separate the parts of its joint consciousness—once the fusion has taken place, the symbiont and host are as one, even though there is some occasional bilateral functioning."
Bashir nodded. "Just as there is with the left and right hemispheres of the human brain."
"Exactly. But here," said Dax, "because of the interference effect of the CI modules—it appears that the neurosystems inside me are not functioning at equal strength; the synchronization between them has been thrown off." She closed her eyes, holding her fingertips to the side of her brow. "I can feel it. It's as if the field created by the CI modules dividing me into two separate creatures again. . . . "
"That does it." Bashir's tone was emphatic. "I'm taking you out of here."
"No—" She grabbed his forearm. "Don't you see? We can use this. Instead of fighting the interference effect, I can yield to it. That way, instead of struggling to resynchronize the two neurosystems, one can simply take precedence over the other and operate as a de facto separate entity."
"I don't know. . . ." Bashir looked doubtful. "This sounds somewhat risky."
"It would only be for while we're here in the holosuite. As soon as we're out again, the two neurosystems would align together once more." Dax closed her eyes again, ttempting to minimize the chaotic sensory stimuli that assaulted her. "I know it can be done. And there isn't any other way."
"Well . . . if you say so; Trill physiology isn't one of my specialties. But I'm telling you—if I even suspect something's gone wrong, I'm carrying you back out the door." He peered more closely at her. "So which part of you is going to go away for a while?"
"In this situation, it's probably better if the symbiont withdraws; the humanoid consciousness retains better control of the host body's motor functions. . . ." Her awareness had already turned inward, toward that world contained by her skin, a world populated by both one creature and two. The symbiont's thoughts had echoed the words she had spoken to Bashir; the decision had already been made, the process set into motion. Dax willed herself to let go, to allow the interference effect to work upon her. . . .
There was no pain or drama to the separation; just a growing sense of aloneness, a loss greater than the merely human ever realized, endurable only because she knew itwould be temporary.
There was perhaps one aboard the station who had ever felt the same. The friendship between the symbiont Dax and Commander Sisko went back many years, to the humanoid host before her. Somewhere in all that accumulation of memory was an hour when Sisko had spoken of the grief he carried within, the death of his wife. As if he had lost something that was as much a part of him as his breath heartbeat. He had loved her that much.
The withdrawal was complete; she could feel the symbiont's separate mind at the edge of her own consciousness, a touch that was even closer than Bashir's supporting arm.
She opened her eyes. In the holosuite's simulated distance, she could see the oppressive night folding around the seemingly solid buildings. A fragment of another time, a crumpled newspaper, tumbled in the draft moving through the low mist. Julian had been correct: it was easily the most convincing holosuite environment she had ever experienced.
"I'm all right now." The nausea and disorientation had receded. She gently removed Bashir's hand from her arm and stepped away from the grasp by which he had held her up. In the dim radiance from the nearest streetlamp, she could see her shadow wavering across the pitted asphalt surface and broken concrete edge of the curb. "We should proceed with the investigation."
They walked together down the street, their mingled shadows falling in and out of the empty doorways. They were looking for something human—or reasonably so.
Commander Sisko had uploaded a hurried memo to them, giving a few details about what he had called "echoes" in the altered holosuites. He hadn't made it clear what he had been doing inside, whether he had been working his own personal investigation, following a hunch . . . it didn't matter. What was important was that his information had given them another lead to trace down, just when they had apparently exhausted all the possibilities of their previously collected data.
If the users of the altered holosuites had left behind electronic echoes of their personalities, they might yield clues to the CI modules' operations—and their source. At a dead end in the research lab, Dax and Bashir had redirected their attention to the infectious vector of the epidemic.
"There's something here; I can feel it." Bashir stopped and looked around. One dismal street had led to another, as if the holosuite were an endlessly repeating field of urban decay. "Definitely a presence."
Dax had to agree with him. An almost subliminal thread, sounds that were just barely at the edge of perception, had led them on a winding course between the crumbling buildings. She held up her hand, signaling him to be silent as she tilted her head to concentrate. Whatever she heard, she would have to interpret it on her own, without the aid of her silently watching other half.
"Over there." She pointed down a dark alley branching off the street. In some ways, it had been easier to pinpoint the sound; as much as she had been diminished from being temporarily separated from her symbiont, there had also been a sharpening, a cleansing, of her perceptions, as though the sensory data were coming undiluted through one less filter. "It sounds like breathing."
The alley ended blind against a dank wall; it reached several stories above her and Bashir, as though the altered holosuite had labored to produce the ultimate symbol of futility, the death and abandonment of every human endeavor. Close to where they stood was a row of battered metal canisters, obviously a re-creation of the artifacts of a primitive waste-removal system; they smelled like rotting food and airborne disease.
Bashir laid a hand against the alley wall, then drew it back, looking in revulsion at the wet residue on his fingertips. "This couldn't be something from Ahrmant Wyoss's own past." He wiped his hand off on his uniform trousers. "From his personnel files, we know that he didn't grow up on any planet as undeveloped as this. My guess is that he indulged in a preference for these ancient films and then, bit by bit, the contents of his subconscious were altered to match up. The literal truth of his past became less important than what he believed, on some deep level, to be its essence. At one time, it was a common enough psychotherapeutic fallacy that subjects could get trapped in."
"But if what Commander Sisko told us is correct, there should be some version of Wyoss himself still here, his echo." The sound of breathing was closer now. Away from the feeble glow of the streetlights, Dax's eyes had adjusted to the alley's darkness. She could see no break or doorway set into the walls on either side, until she looked down and saw a grime-clouded basement window at the level of the pavement. Kneeling down, she wiped a layer of dirt away with her palm. "Look—" She gestured for Bashir to stoop down beside her. "This must be it."
A primitive light-emitting device, a glass sphere with a flickering electric current inside, dangled from a bare wire, illuminating a basement room. If anything, the aura of decay and stilled cycles of time was even more palpable on the other side of the glass pane. Wooden shelves along one of the cellar walls sagged under the weight of what Dax took to be food-preserving containers, some of the jars broken, others oozing their contents through the seals of their metal lids. An assortment of worn-out brooms and mops, which looked like bones and straggly hair of emaciated corpses, filled one corner of the space; cardboard boxes collapsing with their burdens of forgotten and incomprehensible objects lined the other walls.
And in the center, beneath the light's yellow glare, was a single cot of tattered canvas. With the figure of a boy upon it, his face buried in his arms.
"That's him," came the whisper
at Dax's ear. Bashir nodded toward the child visible through the smeared window. "That's Wyoss."
She knew it was true; there was no need to see the boy's features. At her back, it felt as though the holosuite's dark limits had closed tighter around them, the cellar room being the dead center of this small world. The innermost circle of a private hell.
Beneath the boy's ragged shirt—he looked to be about nine or ten years old—his shoulder blades moved with each inhalation. Dax realized now that it hadn't been his breathing that she had heard and that had led them to this spot; it had been a muffled sobbing, a sound both heartbroken and exhausted, one that might have been going on forever, in the hopeless way in which a bleak eternity is confronted.
"There's somebody coming—" Beside her, Bashir pointed to a shadow that had appeared on the wooden steps leading from the floor above.
The boy lifted his tear-wet face from the cot and looked up at the figure that had entered the cellar space. An adult, face cast in shade by the light dangling just a few inches over his head. Dax could see that, even though the boy didn't move from the cot, didn't try to escape, his torso still cringed back from the apparition. The figure held something in his hands, cradling it like a beloved thing; an object long and slender, rigid where its grip was laced with leather straps, tapering to a flexible curve, point studded with a bright spark of metal. As Dax watched, the figure raised the whiplike instrument; the boy rolled away from its approach, drawing his knees toward his chest and guarding his face between his bare forearms and trembling fists. She saw then that his shirt was not ragged but torn, as was the bleeding flesh beneath.
"It's not real," said Bashir as she turned away. "You have to remember that. It's all illusion. Even the boy—that's just an echo, a little bit of data caught in a loop in the circuits. . . ."
She didn't care. Perhaps if the symbiont had been part of her consciousness at this moment, instead of merely observing all that happened at the edge of her mind, that would have provided enough ballast for her to have maintained a clinical detachment. But right now she didn't want to see what she knew was going to happen. It was bad enough that she could still hear it, the high, singing note of the lash as it cut through the air, the sharp impact upon the skin, the gasping sound that was half a cry, half the fearful stifling of that cry.
With her eyes closed, Dax could see the figure more clearly, dissecting the glimpse she'd had of him. Not his face, but what he wore: an exact simulation of Benjamin Sisko's uniform as a Starfleet commander, complete to the small insignia upon the collar.
There was at last—mercifully—silence; she looked at the basement window and saw that the cellar was empty now. She didn't know, and didn't want to ask Bashir what had happened; perhaps the adult figure had led the weeping boy up the stairs, or all the echoes and images had simply vanished, their time-locked rituals expiated for a while. Though something had been left behind: on the cot, like a sleeping snake, lay the instrument the figure had carried in its hands.
"Let's go, Julian." A different nausea had settled at the base of her throat. "I think we've seen enough."
"Wait a minute." He searched the ground, finally prying up a loose stone from the wet pavement. With it, he broke out the window glass, carefully brushing loose the shards from around the edges. The opening was just big enough for him to slide through and land on his feet inside the cellar.
"What're you doing?"
"I think . . . we just have a piece of interesting evidence here." When he climbed back out, he had the lash coiled in one hand.
Neither of them spoke, even after they had exited the holosuite chamber and stepped out into the corridor beyond; not until they had returned to the brightly lit research lab.
Bashir laid the instrument out on one of the benches. It had persisted after its removal from the holosuite, indicating that it was a replicated material object and not just an illusion created by the interaction of the holosuite's low-level tractor beams.
"What did you bring that out for?" Dax looked at the object with a residue of distaste. She felt whole again; the symbiont's system had resumed its normal functioning, operating in parallel with that of the humanoid host body. As though waking from a partial slumber, her augmented mind had begun processing and sorting through all that it had perceived.
"I thought so," murmured Bashir. He traced the object's length with a fingertip before turning toward her. "You noticed, didn't you, how the altered holosuite was a jumble of stimuli from several different sources—"
"I saw that there was some apparition seemingly dressed as Commander Sisko, if that's what you mean."
Bashir nodded. "That certainly explains the murderous fixation Wyoss had formed upon the commander. Wyoss had apparently been caught in a cycle of endlessly repeating some trauma suffered while he was a child; the CI module wired into the holosuite translated that into an environment where Sisko assumed the role of that malignant authority figure. Poor Wyoss had been trying to break out of that toxic world in the only way he could figure out."
"We had already hypothesized that, Julian."
"True; it's the other elements of the hallucinated world that are important. Obviously, the CI module has its own internal programming that it uses to warp the user's perceptions along certain specific patterns. It has to fill in certain bits and pieces to make everything work out. So there's always something left behind—that's something I learned from O'Brien, when he told me how he'd shown to Odo that someone had been tampering with those holosuites." He picked up the object from the bench; it lay heavily across his upturned palms. "Take this, for instance—it's actually a more clever apparatus than it initially appears. Technically, it's known as a limited trauma-induction device; the metal tip has miniature repulsion flanges that can be programmed to a maximum epidermal penetration depth. Very useful for achieving the most pain with the least life-threatening damage to the individual."
Dax studied the object in Bashir's hands. "How do you know about all this?"
"During my internship, I pulled a brief tour of duty in rehab clinic for Starfleet personnel who had been prisoners of war." His fist closed around the instrument's knotted handle "This . . . thing is only used in one system. It has a primitive effectiveness that makes it of particular appeal to the Cardassians." Bashir tossed it back onto the bench. "Now we know where the CI modules came from."
CHAPTER 9
She went to the commander's office on Ops, straight from docking the Mekong. As soon as she entered and the door closed behind her, she could discern that this meeting was not going to go well. The expression on the commander's face was as ominous as banks of storm clouds gathering at the horizon.
"Have a seat, Major." Sisko pointed to the chair in front of his desk. "There's a lot we need to talk about."
"I expect so." Kira sat down, feeling the bone-weariness from the journey seep through her body. After everything that had happened this last time on Bajor, she would have been even more grateful to have gone to her quarters and dropped the bed for several hours' sleep. But now the situation had gone from imminent crisis to actual emergency; there never seemed to be time for mere physical—and mental—recuperation.
"We've already been apprised of the latest developments the Bajoran government." Sisko leaned back in his own chair, forming a cage out of his fingertips. "Or perhaps I should say the late Bajoran government. It now looks as if we'll be dealing with the Severalty Front on a much more formal basis than we had anticipated would be the case."
She nodded. "You're right about that, Commander. I'll be preparing a full report on the coup d'etat—"
"That won't be necessary, Major. I've instructed Odo to put me in touch with his primary intelligence sources on Bajor." The commander's voice was stiffly formal. "All pertinent data will be routed through an analysis team that I've assembled here aboard the station. As of now, and until further notice, you're relieved of your liaison duties."
"What?" Kira stared at him in disbelief. "Are you jok
ing? There's no one aboard DS9 with the kind of expertise I have in Bajoran political affairs—"
Sisko's expression remained grim. "That may well be, Major. But there aren't other personnel with the same suspicions attached to them, either."
"Suspicions?" She couldn't believe what she was hearing; her incredulity cut through the fatigue she had felt only a moment before. "With all due respect, Commander, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Rest assured that I'm handling this entirely on an informal basis, Major. Nothing's gone on your record—yet."
"Oh? I presume that's because, whatever 'suspicions' you might have, nothing's been proven." There was no preventing the sarcasm from sharpening her words. "Yet."
He gave a single nod of his head. "That is in fact the case. And I'm certainly committed to the principle of accepting your innocence until such time as any degree of guilt might be established. But at the same time, I can't allow the possibility of disloyalty to the mission of Deep Space Nine to adversely affect our operations at this critical time—"
Kira gripped the arms of the chair, to keep herself rising up like a barely contained explosion. "Are you making an accusation against me, Commander?"
"As I said, not at this moment." Sisko carefully kept his voice level. "I don't have the time right now to decide upon an interpretation of your recent actions. It may well be that you are responsible for nothing more than some severe lapses in judgment. That would be bad enough, but it would also be a great deal more excusable."
She held her silence for a moment, restraining the outburst of anger that swelled at the base of her throat. "What exact actions are you referring to?"
